Tuesday, 27 November 2007

I had last weekend off and I decided to go out and party hard because I hadn’t done that for a fair while. I spent Saturday night and the early hours of Sunday morning in various pubs and bars around the city with friends and had a really good time.

It’s around 03:30 and it’s time to go home. Me and my mates are in the taxi queue and it’s bloody freezing. All of us who are waiting are shivering, jumping up and down or huddling with friends to try and keep warm. The usual late-night banter is going on there’s the usual last-gasp efforts to try and pull and take someone home that evening.

Behind me in the queue is a rather attractive tall, young lady with her friend and behind them are a group of three guys. One of the men suddenly says to the tall girl.

“Oh my God! Look at your foot!”

The young lady has a small cut on the top of her foot that has bled. She’s wearing strappy high-heels so you can clearly see rivulets of dried blood across the top and down the sides of her right foot. The lady herself is pretty oblivious to it, like the rest of us, she’s more concerned with keeping the hypothermia at bay.

“You’re BLEEDING!” he continues.

She looks at him impassively, “Yeah, I know”

“You should go to hospital!” the man urges

A little alarm bell goes of in my head and I decide to cut in. “No, she doesn’t,” I say.

The man fixes me with a look. “Yes she does! Look at her foot, man.” He looks at her foot again, eyes nearly bulging out of their sockets. “You should go o A&E, you might bleed to death!”

“Look,” I say. “You don’t need to go to A&E, you just need to go home, wash your foot and put a plaster on it.”

have you read the new book about the relaity of working in the front line of the nhs; in stitches; the highs and lows of life as an A&RE doctor. It is causing a bit of a media stir. At last someone standing up for what we have all been saying for ages.see below for further info